---
title: What are Agents?
sidebarTitle: Introduction
---

<Tip>Agents are the intelligent, autonomous entities that power your AI workflows.</Tip>

Agents represent AI models capable of understanding instructions, making decisions, and completing tasks. Think of agents as your AI workforce, each potentially specialized for different types of work.


Each agent in ControlFlow is a configurable entity with its own identity, capabilities, and even personality. Agents can even represent different LLM models, allowing you to optimize your AI workflows to always use the most appropriate model for the task at hand.

## Why Agents Matter

Agents are fundamental to ControlFlow's approach to AI workflows for three critical reasons:

1. **Portable Configuration**: Agents encapsulate how we interact with LLMs, providing a consistent and portable way to configure AI behavior. This abstraction allows you to define specialized AI entities that can be reused across different tasks and workflows, ensuring consistency and reducing complexity in your AI applications.

2. **Specialization and Expertise**: Agents can be tailored for specific domains or tasks, allowing you to create AI entities with deep, focused knowledge. This specialization leads to more accurate and efficient task completion, mimicking how human experts collaborate in complex projects. By combining multiple specialized agents, you can tackle complex, multi-faceted problems that a single, general-purpose AI might struggle with.

3. **Structured Collaboration**: When combined with ControlFlow's flow management, agents provide a powerful framework for organizing the flow of information and context between AI entities. This structured approach to agent collaboration enables more sophisticated problem-solving, allowing you to break down complex tasks into manageable steps and leverage the strengths of different agents at each stage of the process.

By leveraging these key aspects of agents in ControlFlow, you can create more powerful, flexible, and manageable AI workflows that can adapt to a wide range of challenges and use cases.

